Sometimes, it’s all-too-easy to overlook the obvious. In the photograph that accompanies this Musing, maybe you glanced at it and saw a work boat, some bare winter trees, fleecy white clouds, and even the wind moving across the water in Turner’s Creek. But now look closer. Do you see the eagle soaring high above the scene? I’d like to tell you that I knew he/she was smack-dab in the center of my composition, but the truth is I didn’t. It was only when I was reviewing my photos at the end of the day that I saw what I had missed in the moment. It was just a lucky shot!
And now I’m wondering what else have I missed seeing along the way. I move through my days glancing, but not always seeing. Seeing takes time, patience, and a willingness to look deeply into the world around me. Am I always successful? Of course not, but in those few rare moments when I do spot the eagle, the juice is always worth the squeeze.
Seeing the unseen is hardly a new concept. It’s biblical; it crosses the territories of many faiths and philosophies. Artists, poets, writers, and thinkers are always striving to reveal the unseen through their creative work. Some even succeed, but by definition, they hunt an elusive prey. Face it: most of us are just too darn busy to make the effort or take the time to part the curtain, look into the beyond, and see the unseen.
It took a blind woman, Helen Keller, to help me begin to understand the challenge of seeing the unseen. “It gives me a deep comforting sense,” she once wrote, “that things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.” Plato used fewer words, but landed on the same spot: “The seen is the changing, the unseen is the unchanging.” In other words, we use our eyes to see what is visible, but it’s our heart—our faith—that sees the unseen.
But let’s not get carried away with the epistemology or all the philosophical intricacies of seeing the unseen. Remember: this all started when I unexpectedly found an eagle soaring through my photograph, an uninvited wedding guest who went on to become the life of the party. And that’s more than sufficient to make me a believer in seeing the unseen.
That day at Turner’s Creek when I was looking through the viewfinder of my camera, I must not have been seeing the world very well. After all, a voracious raptor was right there in front of me and I missed it completely. When I did finally see it, I thought it must have been a speck of dust on my camera’s lens. Imagine my surprise when I looked closely enough to discern it wasn’t a speck of dust; it was an eagle!
A couple of paragraphs ago, I cut off Helen Keller before she had finished. She went on write this: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
Leave it to a blind woman,,,
I’ll be right back.
Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His debut novel, “This Salted Soil,” a delightful children’s book, “The Ballad of Poochie McVay,” and two collections of essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”), are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is Musingjamie.net.
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